Yeah. Yeaaahhhh…
LAST TIME, ON ‘ANGST-WRACKED PONTIFICATIONS OF A GUY WITH AN INTERNET SOAP-BOX:’
Next time, probably around wednesday/thursday, I’ll be exploring the sudden realization that despite all being well I was not a happy person and how conversely now that things are not as ideal I seem to have found a new zest for life.
NOW, THE THRILLING CONCLUSION!!??!!
Essentially that’s not gonna happen. Aside from the fact we’re passed that little self-imposed deadline…I don’t feel any particular need to air more of my personal luggage at this time. My personal blog is just becoming so full of…ME. So what else can I write about in this blog, The Blocked Pipe, ‘Tales in Frustration and Writers Block!’?
Ohh! I know! Author Stuff!
And so:
Scraps and Fragments.
I may have mentioned before my huge collection of note books and pads, all filled with scrawled ideas and stick men brutalizing eachother in a representation of my suppressed homoerotic-sadist tendencies bein’wacky. This collection is impressive and ever growing, but most of the ideas jotted down between doing constructive things throughout my day never make it past that point and remained undecipherable chunks of dot-pointed shorthand.
The lucky ones make it into the labyrinthine network of folders and files in my computer and back up hard drives either under their own brand-new folder or as part of an already existing project. Sometimes I just stick them in ‘Shorts’ and leave it. A lot of the time the idea is revolutionizing a previous form of the idea and so I re-make the old folder with a ‘2.0′ or whatever next to it and go from there. My oldest novel is up to version 3.3 of it’s second re-imagining.
So what I have is a whole pile of fragments and scraps. Sections and beginnings of stories that go no where and sometimes resemble eachother (and more often then not are cringe worthy piles of shit). But I never delete or throw anything out because at some stage I’ll come back to it and either still hate it or realize it’s the missing piece of a larger puzzle I’m trying to put together. Stuff that was never intended to mix can be jammed together with heavy re-writing to create a better whole.
The prime example today was my furthered attempts to construct a decent expositional prologue for a story. In this scene I basically need a character who becomes prevalent in the plot later on to be in a combat zone and left in a cliff-hangar situation, to help fuel the story later on. I’ve attempted this twice; the first time I ended up with eight thousand words of mary-sue filled shite and the second time I wrote myself into a corner then decided to get drunk and forget about it, spending the next few days brainstorming a scenario in which a lone French Foreign Legionnaire slaughters a company of African Child Soldiers stealing all the spare change from a local mall.
Today I was looking for a specific novellete I’d attempted as a companion piece of the first iteration of the longest running effort at a novel a few years ago, detailing a logistic officer’s Apocolypse Now-esque journey through a warzone. It’s intended to be the second piece of the story starting with the as yet unwritten prologue now; unfortunately I had difficulty finding it.
What I did stumble upon was a writing exercise I slammed out around the same time. It was a battle scene from the first book written from a different perspective and a different POV to the book. At the time I was finding it useful to break away and write flash-fiction in a different canon in a totally different style to break my block; switching from omnipotent third person to exclusive first person really makes you miss the ability to just cut from scene to scene. In any case I wrote this fragment from the perspect of a character who pretty much experienced the events of that scene in the book from a distance and had his own problems to deal with; it really fleshed out thebook in my mind and felt great. Then of course the rest of the book turned to drivel and I abandoned it totally.
But today I saw that fragment and apart from defacing it by replacing a few character-descriptive sentences with ‘MARY SUE MARY SUE MARRIED TO VOLDERMORT AND CARRYING A Mk.II GARY STU RIFLE’ can see real potential for the prologue I’ve been trying to make.
So what’s the story/moral here? Never throw anything away. Just because it doesn’t work or it’s shit you’ll find that later on when you’re struggling to write something else that you may have already written the proto-form of that idea.
So that’s all from me today.
This has been Ian Bell for The Blocked Pipe, asking you all WANNA TURN UP THE HEAT? SLAMMIN’!
Bye for now.
Leave a Reply